lvarchar question.

Can I only add printable characters to an lvarchar or can I add a string of bytes, each byte being in the value range 0..255. If I can do this, how would I do it. For example I want a string where the first byte had the value 5 and the subsequent 5 bytes had the values 104, 101, 108, 108, 111 ("hello"). If this is possible, then would byte string be correctly ordered if indexed, ie on the first byte first (the 5), then the 104 etc... Also would the data be retrievable from the database, or would this 5 get converted to a space ? I hope this makes sense. Many thanks, Andrew H sending to informix-list